International Data Corporation (IDC) on Tuesday published quarterly shipment data for the Asia Pacific region. As per their Quarterly Mobile Tracker for Q2 2015, India itself shipped 26.5 million smartphones this quarter, which is up by 44% from the 18.4 million units for the same period last year. Also, this quarter performance growth was 19% from the sluggish Q1 2015.
The report adds that this growth was specific to smartphones, although the overall Indian mobile phone market shrunk by 6%. In this, vendors only shipped 59.4 million units compared to 63.2 million units last year Q2 2014.
IDC suggests that the growth in the smartphone market was due to more affordable smartphones penetration and of course the online retailers / eTailers.
“The share of smartphone shipments through eTailers increased for most of the key vendors in Q2,” said Kiran Kumar, Research Manager with IDC’s India Mobile Phone team.
Coming to the individual players, Samsung remained the leader in the India this quarter despite experiencing a decline in quarter-on-quarter shipment. Micromax also made a comeback in 2015 with 60% QoQ growth. Intex bounced up to number 3 position with strong presence in sub-$100 segment. Lava remained in top 5 with the 4th position and Lenovo was the 5th OEM in the list.
“Key to the success of the Chinese vendors has been popular flash sales through online players such as Flipkart, Snapdeal, and Amazon. At the same time, they have also focused on bringing more 4G phones at affordable US$100-150 price points, which is a segment left unattended by Indian and global vendors,” said Kiranjeet Kaur, Research Manager with IDC’s Asia/Pacific Mobile Phone team.
IDC further expects that Indian smartphone market is likely to maintain a double-digit growth over the next few years, and may overtake the United States as the second largest smartphone market globally by 2017.